IT’S THE LAST MONTH OF JUNIOR RESIDENCY IN THE CARDIOTHORACIC ICU | Joey Lew

Writing used to be weightless.
Now I’m a pressurized cylinder and the words

come out when the pop off valve shoots
across the room. This man with his chest

open with plastic tubing running from a fake
heart to fake lungs to a real heart that was

gifted to him by a dead man—he is my
charge tonight. Here they’d make a ragdoll

walk laps. The toughest ex-SEAL has nothing
on these people—cut open, sewn shut,

pieced together, grafted, ungrafted, paced,
diverted, rerouted—walking the halls with

pushes of medication to stave off collapse.
I barely take the stairs. Yesterday I ate three

mini Snickers and a Werther’s Original
for dinner. The patients have gotten sicker

and so have I. I wanted to write about
rescue, because the recovery of it all

is a mixed-cut diamond. Because hybrid people-
plastics with open chests and breathing tubes

walk out the front door. Because I fall in love
with this job every time we fix someone,

even if all I did was watch their monitor
and pray. But the sitcom era has passed.

The dramedy is in; happy and unhappy
endings. The patient who died was not

the only patient who died, even in that
room, this month. It is the operating cost

and I knew that. At least, I think I did.

Joey Lew is the author of the poetry collection Insensible Losses. Lew, who holds an MFA in poetry from UNCG and an MD from UCSF, is currently a surgical resident at Duke University. Her recent work can be found in Four Tulips, The MacGuffin, A Poet's Directory of Wild Things, The American Journal of Surgery and JAMA.